He’s no knight in shining armour

22:11 – 11/5/2016 – 1984 Tattoo Shop – Hanoi.

David is getting a tattoo on his ass right now. It’s me, David, Laura, Andrew, and Kevin left in Hanoi as the sole survivors of the Bacon Ninja Cats crew. The crew is dissolving in the ether of travel, like sugar in gasoline. The whir of a tattoo gun permeates the room, and there’s some house music playing in the background. This mix is new and foreign–but it’s good.

They tattooed his foot first–it looked painful. We returned yesterday from the Vietnam Backpackers Castaways trip. That legendary trip you hear about over cans of Chang, Angkor, or BeerLao from a beat looking traveller who just finished their circuit in Vietnam. We had to go–all eight of us.

He shotgunned 50 beers yesterday. It started at 07.00 when we all had to wake up for breakfast. It was our last day on Castaways Island, and soon we had to board the ferry back to Cát Bà and ultimately return to sweaty Hanoi.

“This is 24, and this is 25!” he said mid-way through the bus from the mainland to Hanoi. The bus moved swiftly down the expressway, but it couldn’t dare rival the momentum of this undertaking. He broke new ground by taking a piss out of the side of the bus, although it was an effort of teamwork. I continued to annoy people with a kazoo.

“Fuck it, I’m going downstairs to get a kebab, and then straight back to bed” he said, laying in a tired mess in his lower dorm bed. We had such a great dorm room for the night–NOFX. The corner dorms are so much nicer in this hostel than the middle ones.

Famous last words my friend. We didn’t see him until morning. Witness reports state that the elevator doors opened and the crowd went electric. “THE SHOTGUN CHAMPION!!!” “THE LEGEND!!!” were some of the quotes. The staff stood him up on the bar, and he shotgunned two more right on the spot. By the end of the night…our champion had earned that tattoo.